MyFolia.com is the facebook for gardeners

Lately I have been spending more time working with garden plants and growing vegetables to balance out my life in the virtual world. I just signed up for a free account in MyFolia, the social network for plant lovers. OMG now I can connect to my "gardening buddies" and add cool MyFolia Badges and Widgets that let people know that I have great rhubarb. I am working on my Folia profile @ doorcountygardener and will soon add my gardens and an inventory of their plants, then even swap real plants with other gardeners and research new varieties.

Using Web 2.0 technology, I will be able to create a valuable garden journal that helps me track the growth and prosperity of plantings. There's also a plant reference wiki to help identify the unknown. MyFolia gardeners are indexed by USDA zones so you can relate to people in similar climactic regions.

Other social networks for gardeners include The Garden Network and GardenWeb.

Merging my special interests...

China's Prime Minister Wen Jia-bao just joined the ranks of hundreds of politicians with pages in Facebook. If you click Browse more Politicians in the upper right corner of any political fan page you gain access to a list, ranked according to their Facebook popularity by the number of on-line fans they have. Premier Wen is very rapidly moving up the ranks of the top ten... currently at number 8, with 25,659 supporters when I joined at 1:26 PM today.

My other special interest, beside the phenomena of social networking is China... and oppose the way we are led by western media to hold negative opinions on one of the oldest cultures in the world. I blog the good news about China and its people at ChinaBright.blogspot.com.

When Corporations listen...

Panasonic is paying close attention to the eyeball migration from top-down network TV watching to the grassroots, bottoms-up, everyman, Web-based video production and distribution channels. Viera Cast technology will link the new line of Panasonic high end TV sets coming out this summer to YouTube, Picasa, Bloomberg's stock ticker and The Weather Channel. A high speed ethernet cable connection to the Internet or a third party wireless adapter is required.

Work-Life personality mind meld...

Thanks to Mari Smith, I am linked into a live teleconference with Richard Laermer, the author of 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade. Here's what I am gathering from Richard:

We live in an era of mediocrity, an unnamed decade, one without any real meaning. This pause that we're in right now is a great opportunity to find all that's new. One big change... the consumer rules now. It's time to embrace a whole new attitude, or get left in the dust. Companies like Sprint that are just after more and more numbers, while they fail to service their existing customers, are doomed.

"If you can't communicate and you can't write, how will people know you're smart?"

It’s more important now to be interesting, to be able to share knowledge and to be able to learn a little bit about everything, by listening. Richard confesses to being an intellectual voyeur.

The work place is changing so drastically. Whining is over. Stop your bitching, No one cares and the air's polluted enough with negative energy. So become a mensch! It's about finding ways to bring our real selves to work... to develop a Work-Life personality balance. Be your real self all of the time instead of having a separate work-self.

Flexibility is the saving grace of the world. Gumbitude (from Gumby) is this idea that we're not necessarily about other people helping us find a solution... it's about finding the way yourself, one way or another. Decide that you will always get it done.

Slow down and sleep more... naps are better for productivity. People who sleep less eat more. In the next couple of years people are going to be learning how to sleep better and become more productive, more insightfiul and more creative. The run, run, lifestyle is not working.

“I can’t tell whether you're careless or stupid…”
Everything you are putting out there needs to be so focussed. Pandering to people on social networks does not work. Have something to say that is so focussed and so alert that people will "get it" and then begin to talk about it. Be a responsible communicator.

In his latest book, Laermer divides the forecasting secrets of top professional trendspotters into the following nine categories:

• Read the signs
• Influence the trends
• Embrace new and reject stodgy
• Anticipate change
• Ask experts the right questions
• Seek out visionaries and snub fakers
• Separate the trends from fads
• Use technology-for everything
• Cash in on being ahead of the competition!

Find out more about Richard Laermer at:

RLMpr.com
Laermer.com
The Bad Pitch Blog An award-winning public relations resource from Richard Laermer and Kevin Dugan, since January 2006. Read our Wrath.
PunkMarketing.com
twitter.com/laermer

BJ Fogg's Psychology of Facebook

Just two class periods remain in BJ Fogg's Psychology of Facebook course at Stanford. If you haven't already, now is the time to tune into the class via web video, live each Thursday about 1:35 PST at this URL: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/psychology-of-facebook

This week they're exploring the psychology of Facebook App Adoption and the psychology of Facebook as Ritual. You'll find readings listed at this page: http://docs.google.com/Doc?docid=dcqn4jpj_230f4phghfm&hl=en

Join this Facebook Page to keep in contact after the course ends to continue learning together: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Psychology-of-Facebook/21745304968

BlogTalkRadio.com

In their own words, "Now it's your turn to share your voice with the world. Become a host and come join the conversation."

BlogTalkRadio is the social radio network that allows users to connect quickly and directly with their audience. Using an ordinary telephone and computer, hosts can create free, live, call-in talk shows with unlimited participants that are automatically archived and made available as podcasts. No software download is required. Listeners can subscribe to shows via RSS into iTunes and other feed readers. The network has produced tens of thousands of episodes since it launched in August of 2006.

Share and study slideshows...

While researching The Psychology of Facebook, an edited volume being created by BJ Fogg, Ph.D., and his colleagues at the Persuasive Technology Lab of Stanford University, I found participants posting a slideshow on slideshare.net.- another info-goldmine worth exploring.

BJ Fogg describes himself as, "...an experimental psychologist who explores how we can use computing technology to change people behaviors and attitudes, an area I call captology. In industry, I lead innovation projects, speak, and facilitate. I also help teams innovate. But I'm mostly known for my work at Stanford. I'm motivated by working with good people to make the world better. Seriously."

The word captology is derived from the first four initials of the words, Computers As Persuasive Technologies. Sam S. Adkins explains why he and other learning professionals are Captivated by Captology.

BJ Fogg says, "A new form of persuasion emerged in 2007: I call it 'mass interpersonal persuasion' (MIP). This phenomenon brings together the power of interpersonal persuasion with the reach of mass media. I believe this new way to change attitudes and behavior is the most significant advance in persuasion since radio was invented in the 1890s."

Learn more about MIP in this white paper by BJ Fogg - Mass Interpersonal Persuasion: An Early View of a New Phenomenon.

Bubbles, tiny bubbles...

After spending way too many years in the virtual world and not enough time in the garden, I recently started feeling blurry. The pathway to my dissolution began innocently enough by creating a MySpace identity. It was a great way to connect with my teenage kids and my musician friends.

Then, I discovered the grownup version of MySpace, or at least the college-level of social networking. I started a page in facebook. It wasn't long after, that I remembered I had a LinkedIn account that I had created a long time before, at the request of a friend. So, I dug that account back up and started working in the LinkedIn business world of social networking.

Meanwhile my YouTube account started sprouting broader social wings. I had an identity there to polish up as well. I discovered how to become a registered expert at SelfGrowth.com and began to meet up with other experts. Now, I need to build a Lens or two or three. Oh yeah, and I have five blogs, two e-zines and three business Web sites.

Help! It feels like I am dissolving into a sea of disparate identity bubbles.

Tiny bubbles in the wine,
make me happy, make me feel fine,
tiny bubbles make me warm all over
with a feeling that I'm gonna love you 'til the end of time.

Don Ho may have been happy staring at those tiny bubbles but I was in a daze...

Then I discovered Bubbl.us and I began mapping myself:



Making a site plan of my virtual identity makes me at least feel like I am the master of my domain(s). The Bubbl.us map i am building is a work in progress as is the application that makes it possible. The developers say bubbl.us 2.0 will provide even more enhanced editor control.

Sharing Advice from the Experts...

Internet Marketing guru, Matt Bacak says here's how to, "Slap Google like a RAG doll with one article :-)" - read his blog for a complete set of details on the following 9 steps:

STEP 1: Write an article.
STEP 2: Submit your article
STEP 3: Rework Your article into a press release and then submit.
STEP 4: Rework Your article into a video.
STEP 5: Submit video.
STEP 6: Turn your audio into a podcast.
STEP 7: Create a blog entry.
STEP 8: Create a Squidoo Lens.
STEP 9: Bookmark your video links.

"What's a Squidoo Lens?" you might ask.
At Squidoo.com you can create a topical Lens on anything that matters to you. It's a single web page that can point to blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, your eBay auctions, CafePress designs, Amazon books, music... and your Web site. Squidoo says, "Build one lens, build a hundred. It's fast, fun, and free." Plus, they pay generous royalties from ads and affiliate links to you and/or to charities.

1. Squidoo currently has more than 450,000 hand built pages.
2. Squidoo has been reviewed by the New York Times, Mashable, BoingBoing and sites and papers around the world.
3. They are one of the 300 most popular websites in the US.
4. They generate hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual royalties to charities and to Squidoo authors - 5% goes to charity, 45% to themselves, the remaining 50% goes to charity or to you, the author (your choice).

Sharing the wealth...

by Stephen Kastner

"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed," says cyber-punk, sci-fi author William Gibson. Here are two ways that seek to restore a bit of balance.

In the White Men Can't Dance department, Rushmore is a new search engine with an algorithmic black attitude. Owner and publisher, Johnny Taylor says, "We want to change the way black community drives the Web ...with everything you get from mainstream search engines like Google, PLUS an added layer of black-specific information."

The site is much more than a black Google. It intends to unite people of color in a social network by providing free membership affiliation, a black news forum and a job network. Taylor says, "The more we use it the better it will get," and of course the better will be his bottom line... $20 million a month? That's how much sites like this are making.

Yuwie.com has a different idea, one that seems a bit more democratically $ocial. Call it the "Amway" of social networking, where users get a cut of the action. Yuwie has created a rewards-based system that pays a percentage of their revenues back to Yuwie members for page views, and for friends, of friends, of friends - 10 levels deep.

ARTICLES & DISCOVERIES:
I just joined Scribd, now billing themselves as "the world’s largest document sharing community." I was looking for a copy of the free PDF version of Scott Siglers' new podiobook Infected. Someone at Crown Publishers decided to promote the hard cover release by giving it away as an e-book, on-line for the 5 days preceding its official bookstore release on April 1, 2008. I don't understand the logic, but now I'm reading the book, and I can...

• Upload and share documents.
  
• Find all kinds of valuable and interesting documents by category, by topic group, by searching,or by just browsing the library.

Professional publishers and developers may wish to check out the Scribd Platform. Get the latest announcements and updates at the Scribd Blog.

Estonia's Digitized Garbage
Bruce Sterling reports on an Estonian cybergreen millionaire's web 2.0-style participatory scheme to clean up his country's illegal garbage dump sites using Google Earth-tagging - and it worked!

Sharing my Social Networking Notebook...

by Stephen Kastner

In 1995 Classmates.com launched the first, open, public, social database. It was soon followed by a wave of social networking sites that would come to redefine the way we use computers, shifting the workspace from the desktop to the global environment.

The concept of Web 2.0 is said to have been created in 2003... instant messaging, wikis, video sharing, mobile technologies and, 20 million bloggers later, we live in a new social sphere. In a world where an explosion in the volume of information processed is equaled only by the spontaneous generation of a new social grid work, there are brand new marketing models continuously spawning and evolving - that see the market as a conversation. This blog is intended to serve as a scratch pad where I note and share my discoveries and observations regarding the ever-emerging world of Web 2.0 technology with anyone who is interested.

I wanted to attend the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, April 22-25, 2008 but even the admission tickets were beyond my current budget. I am glad to see that the presentation files from speakers are available on-line. Thanks O'Reilly!

At the bottom of this page I have included a video search tool that should seek out and display continuously fresh content regarding the latest YouTube clips about Web 2.0 and Social Networking. In ten days the DesignWise video channel should be also be accessible and I'll add my related YouTube playlist.



ARTICLES:
Social networking meets search: Sightix
Posted by Rafe Needleman
I wouldn't say that Google is broken. But after looking at concepts by Delver (review) and Sightix, it has become clear to me how much better search can be - in theory - when it knows more about the person doing the searching, and when it knows about their social network.
Read more

Digsby makes Facebook chat work like it should
Posted by Josh Lowensohn
Do-it-all communication app Digsby put out an important update yesterday that's made this blogger's life easier. It took Facebook's Web-only chat service and integrated it into a desktop application.
Read more